Recently we sat down to have an interview with Pierrick Filippi, co-founder and CEO of Like a Bird!

Hi Pierrick, can you tell us more about what Like a Bird does and how it creates added value for its users?

Like a Bird has developed two products that facilitate the life of community managers and improve the user experience of brand community members. The first product is a SaaS tool focused on marketing campaign management on Twitter (quizzes & bots). The tool allows users to configure marketing campaigns with just a few clicks and makes it easy to follow statistics as the campaigns progress. Follow & RT, Instant-Win or BotOReply, are also easily accessible through this tool.

The more recently released second product is a chat development platform for Facebook Messenger, Twitter DM and Websites. Our home framework allows us to develop powerful chatbots that understand natural language and that are equipped with alert features to call the attention of community managers in case a troublesome situation pops up. This tool allows users to carry out marketing campaigns and manage customer relationships (FAQ, assumption of level 1 after-sales service, pre-sales, etc.).

In 2015, you and Rémi Grattarola, your partner, chose Pentalabbs IT & CTO for Equity offer, what influenced you to make this decision?

The IT & CTO for Equity offer seemed like the best way to accelerate our business quickly and efficiently. It was a unique opportunity to build a strong development team within a very short timeframe, the classic fundraising route takes time and involves a long and hazardous recruitment process. The contribution of an interim CTO has also made it possible to structure and organize the team with processes and tools very adapted to the constraints of our startup.

Can you tell us more about how you collaborated with the dev team but also on the techno developed?

The dev team quickly took over our home stack, Symfony / Angular on one side and Python on the other. As our infrastructure was hosted on Amazon Web Services, the dev team was able to rapidly access our technology and quickly get to work on improving deployment processes.

Our collaboration included a lot of communication, both through text and voice chats, on a daily basis. Strong lines of communication helped us to keep precise documentation and create detailed task descriptions. Regular communication (thanks Skype) and routine trips to meet the team in person is essential to creating a strong like between the teams and giving meaning to the project. It is important to make the dev team feel like they are involved and part of the company, this increases morale and makes them more invested in the issues and results related to their work.

Today, the tech roadmap of Like a Bird has made good progress. What role does Pentalabbs play for you on a daily basis?

Today Pentalabbs plays an advisory and support role, giving us advice and helping us implement our new ideas. Pentalabbs has also helped Like a Bird quite a bit with visibility. Thanks to Pentalabbs we were able to attend the Vivatech and Shake conferences and have been quoted in blogs.

What do you have planned for the next few months?

Our return from the summer holidays will be loaded! We will launch a new website dedicated to our chatbot platform (before we were focused on the R & D framework and the signature of the first references ;-)). We will launch several chatbots for major accounts in various sectors (including banking and insurance). At the same time, our customers in marketing operations will benefit from an even more efficient infrastructure to handle the growing volume of tweets they need to managed for each campaign! There are a lot of great things coming that promise for a thrilling end to 2017.